[R-sig-Debian] Taking determinant of a matrix of NAs results in intermittent memory corruption

[Ian Erickson]

Greetings; I've posted the following to R's bug tracking system (at https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=17210 ) and Martin Maechler requested that I post to this list as well.
If I start R from the command line with --vanilla, then repeatedly execute the following line:

det(matrix(nrow=10,ncol=10))

... I eventually get a crash, with error:

*** Error in `/usr/lib/R/bin/exec/R': malloc(): memory corruption: 0x0000000002399400 ***

The specific address in memory that is referenced varies. The number of times I need to execute the above line before getting a crash also varies.

This occurs with a wide range of matrix dimensions; 10x10 is not the only size that causes this issue.

output of R.version:
platform      x86_64-pc-linux-gnu
arch          x86_64
os            linux-gnu
system        x86_64, linux-gnu
status
major          3
minor          3.2
year          2016
month          10
day            31
svn rev        71607
language      R
version.string R version 3.3.2 (2016-10-31)
nickname      Sincere Pumpkin Patch

I am running Linux Mint 17.3; my CPU is an Intel Core i7-2620m (Sandy Bridge). My RAM is non-ECC. My R binary is from the CRAN Ubuntu repository at cran.cnr.berkeley.edu . (r-base and r-base-core versions 3.3.2-1trusty0 )

I also see this issue running R within Emacs, as well as Rstudio.

This issue may be related to https://bugs.r-project.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=16862 but I'm not certain.

The output of La_version() for me is:
[1] "3.5.0"

The output of:
system(paste("lsof -p", Sys.getpid(), "| grep -iE '(blas|lapack)'"))
is:
R      3636 <myusername>  mem    REG              252,0    39272 11930369 /usr/lib/R/modules/lapack.so
R      3636 <myusername>  mem    REG              252,0  5882272 11933488 /usr/lib/lapack/liblapack.so.3.0
R      3636 <myusername>  mem    REG              252,0 23108112 11929607 /usr/lib/openblas-base/libopenblas.so.0
Is anyone able to reproduce?

Thanks,

--Ian